Your Right to Know

PHOENIX — Planned Parenthood Arizona filed an appeal yesterday after a federal judge refused to
temporarily block the nation’s most stringent restrictions on the use of abortion drugs.

The organization’s motion with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day that
Arizona’s landmark regulations took effect.

U.S. District Judge David C. Bury had considered temporarily blocking the new rules with an
injunction on Monday, but he decided against such action just hours before the regulations went
into effect.

That ruling came in response to an earlier lawsuit by Planned Parenthood Arizona and the private
abortion clinic Tucson Women’s Center, which say the rules severely infringe on a woman’s ability
to have an abortion.

The abortion rules were released in January by the Arizona Department of Health Services. They
ban women from taking the most common abortion-inducing drug — RU-486 — after the seventh week of
pregnancy. Women had been allowed to take the abortion pill through nine weeks of pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood estimates that 800 women would have had to get surgical abortions in 2012 if
the rules were in effect then.

An attorney for the organization also told the judge last week that the new rules could force
its Flagstaff abortion clinic to suspend operations. A spokeswoman said on Monday, however, that
the group is evaluating how it will proceed, and operations at the Flagstaff clinic will
continue.

In his ruling, Bury acknowledged that the new rules will make it more difficult for some women
in Arizona, especially those in the northern part of the state, to get abortions as they have to
travel farther and make more trips to clinics. But he said they aren’t obstacles big enough to show
that the rules should be blocked.

Attorney Mike Tyron, arguing the case for the state, described the rules as a simple shift in
abortion regulations that amounts to a minor inconvenience for women.